The last few days have seen some ripples caused by Matt Cutts blog inviting people to report paid for links.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

Google’s objection to paid links is that people can simply buy their way onto well regarded sites, and influence Google to think that these links are a valid endorsement of the target site.

Matt posts elsewhere about how you can sell links in a way that Google won’t penalise you for.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/

The post starts off talking about hidden links, which have for a long time been a no no, but than Matt makes this statement:

“If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. ”

What Matt is saying is that we should be changing the basic fundamentals of how we create links using a simple ‘a’ tag to tell Google about any commercial imperative behind the link.

Well, Google can go to hell before I’ll ever do this. What is becoming apparent is that the fundamental basis of their algorithm is flawed.

Google is built on the assumption that links=popularity in a subject, which is wrong. For example I am a dreadful football player. That link in google’s eyes is adding weight to the idea that I have anything to do with football, when actually the opposite is true.

Lets have a look at the idea that links carry any weight. Check out this page: http://www.forbes.com/mesothelioma_attorney.html

Google’s assumption is that Forbes, being a large site with lots of links to it, has some sort of editorial integrity and that when it links to another site it confers some sort of respect behind that link.

Google is wrong.

Forbes is a commercial media owner and anyone with the budget can buy a link pretty much anywhere on the site. In fact I did it last month for a client, it’s called an advert, and if you’re buying on a tenancy basis then there is no obligation on Forbes to bother putting adserver tracking behind the link. I can see the traffic from that page in my own analytics package. A straight and simple direct link to my page is all that’s needed so that’s all we did. I’m certainly not going back and adding in any code for Google’s sake.
Why should I, on Google’s request alter that link to show that it was paid for. Why should I put effort in to help Google be more successful?

Silence.

That’s because there is NO reason for me to help fix their flawed algorithm.

Many of the things we do to make our sites more SEO friendly, we do because they also help the user. URL rewrites help the user see what the page is about before they click on the link to that page. Good page structure and use of tags is just an online version of what librarians and archivists have done since before the internet. But links? Links are just links, pure and simple, and no assumption about what that link confers can be made without a sense of intuition that only a human can create.

How do I know that a link from BBC.co.uk is more honest than one from Forbes.com? My own experience is what tells me that, not some tagging added by the webmaster.

I sell links all the time, I put a banner, with appropriate alt text and a text link beneath it on the Kingston Rowing Club site when a local estate agent gave us £1,000 to help our juniors programme. Was that a paid link to help SEO? Even I as the webmaster have no idea of the motivation. I imagine it was for branding and kudos, but I wasn’t in the room when the cheque was signed so I have no idea if SEO was part of the equation.

Google has turned a corner and started not just for us to do things ‘properly’ but to do things ‘their way’. I for one won’t be playing their game.